Motorway 2 from Lahore to Islamabad used to be so good that it offered riskless driving. Sadly, it’s no longer the case, as my recent experience showed me. The motorway has become bumpy at a number of places. Smoothness of the surface is gone and your vehicle moves jerkily making you feel as if you are on an old style highway of yesteryears. That’s not all. You frequently hit repaired patches which are done shoddily and aren’t at level with the rest of the surface.

Additionally, you discover to your horror that there are potholes in the fast and middle lanes. Imagine you are going 120 kilometers per hour and suddenly your auto hits a gaping pothole. What would happen to the tyres, alignment and suspension of your vehicle can be guessed. At times it may prove a death trap. The wear and tear is natural but why is the repair work not taken care of? Lack of funds? No, not at all. The distance between Lahore and Islamabad, for example, is about 370km and you pay Rs1,510 if you drive a car as a toll road (it will increase from mid June, say news reports). It means you pay more than Rs4 per kilometer. Heavy vehicles pay much more. How many vehicles use this motorway one finds hard to count. It’s one of the busiest motorways of the country. Imagine the amount collected daily. Where does the money go if it’s not spent on the maintenance and repair? There are long stretches that produce unnecessary noise that distracts you and after some moments it gets on your nerves. The rough road surface causes friction with the tyres to produce a loud noise that’s otherwise avoidable.

After driving some distance you see an interchange called Hiran Minar, a historical site Emperor Jahangir built to commemorate the death of his favourite pet deer in the early 17th century. This is the area where Waris Shah, the bard of Punjab, was born, and lies buried. The sign gives no information about him. The motorway authorities, it seems, are hooked on the pomp of dead kings, not the ever-inspiring imaginative sweep of the immortal poet reflecting ‘the soul of soulless conditions’. Typical self-hating Punjabi mindset formed in the colonial and post-colonial periods stares you in the face.

On both sides of the motorway you hardly find trees. And if and when you do, you notice that they are the most unsuitable for our climatic conditions as they are neither shady nor bird-friendly. Secondly, being poplar and eucalyptus trees, they are water guzzlers in a land that suffers from a chronic water shortage. Why can’t we have indigenous trees which are ideally suited for our dry climate? The ‘babus’ in the ivory towers perhaps never take a peek outside their windows.

Between Lahore and Islamabad you come across three important rivers; Chenab, Jhelum and Soan. These rivers are stuff of legends and lore, and have been celebrated since the times of Harappa. The ancient history that doesn’t bear the imprint of our current faith is a taboo subject here. But can a change of faith erase the past of a people? No. But it can in our society. Collective amnesia is celebrated here as a source of imagined bliss. When you cross bridges on these rivers you can’t see the waters in the river beds. The authorities have literally veiled them by putting up grills and railings that block the view of the rivers. A sane mind with a bit of imagination would have converted these rivers sites into picnic spots allowing the commuters and their families to spend some pleasurable moments at the rivers’ banks listening to the mysterious whispering of the glacial waters that they carry. Riparian entertainment is something forbidden. Can one forget that some legendary heroes and heroines such as Heer and Ranjha, Sohni and Mahinwal and Sahiban and Mirza have left indelible marks on the banks of Chenab which is celebrated as the lovers’ river? Only the brain dead can forget how incredibly brave Raja Porus fought the invading Greek armies led by Alexander of Macedon on the River Vitasta ( Vehit/ Jhelum)?

Greek historian Plutarch tells us how the battle with Porus “blunted the edge of Macedonians’ courage” and “halted their further progress into India.” Eternally flowing Soan (vagni pai Soan, dhola) shows us unmistakable signs of its stone age culture with mammoths and animals that lived both on land and in water. That a bureaucrat worth his/her salt is defined by lack of imagination is amply proven.

Once crossing the Potohar region you could see what a poet painted for us: “What did you see, wanderer? / I saw a pleasant landscape; there was a grey hill against a clear sky, and the grass waved in the wind/ A house leaned against the hill like a woman leaning against a man.” But no longer! After crossing Chakri interchange which is close to Islamabad, you suddenly see smudges on the hilly landscapes that mar their natural beauty. You see trucks, bulldozers, cranes and gaudy signboards loudly announcing the upcoming residential colonies on both sides of the motorway. Lust and greed both are on display. People produce more and more children, and bureaucrats and investors allow more and more sprawl of residential areas severely endangering nature, environments and ecosystems.

Vertical expansion, quintessentially an urban phenomenon, fails to impress our town planners and civic engineers. More and more land which could be put to productive use is being waylaid by our building mafia. And we proudly project it as a sign of development and modernity. If we eat up our cultivable lands we would have to learn to eat stones in the near future. Would our stomachs be that strong? Nature is the first and the last refuge of all animals including humans that roam this planet. We tend to forget that we are part of the animal kingdom. A bangle seller carrying a load of bangles on his donkey met a policeman on the way. The policeman hit the load with his staff and shouted ‘what’s in there’. ‘There would be nothing if you hit it again,’ replied the bangle seller. Can we be wise enough not to hit what we have been left with? — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, June 16th, 2025